Here is the link to the podcast entitled How Instagram Took Over the World. I highly recommend listening to it in its entirety. There is much to learned from the very insightful Mr. Krieger about the constantly changing world of startups. My admiration and gratitude to both him and Mr. Thompson for such a lively and engaging presentation.

Here is a brief summary of the subjects covered in the order they were discussed:

Instagram originally began as an app called “Burbn”. It was not being used much at the time, but its photo-posting feature immediately drew the most interest of its initial users. The knowledge gained from the experience with Burbn became the foundation upon which Instagram was later built.¹

The co-founders’ key concerns all along have been ease-of-use in getting photos uploaded as quickly as possible and making them look good with the available filters and features.

When Instagram first launched, it very quickly gained an international audience. It generated early excitement because there were no language barriers in following other users. One of the initial and inspiring experiences of early users was following and supporting the rescue efforts after the 2011 tsunami in Japan.

At first, the co-founders were completely focused upon building the app’s infrastructure.

The media initially perceived the app as “something for hipsters”. In fact, a wide diversity of users was genuinely connecting with each other.

The co-founders needed to become well versed in copyright matters, as the users, not Instagram, own their photos. This included the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Facebook purchased Instagram for approximately $1 billion in 2012. ² While FB’s philosophy is generally to get new projects implemented quickly online, Instagram prefers to take more time with their new upgrades and features to make certain they are done right.

Instagram has always been a “cohesive experience for users”.

Instagram has “changed the world” insofar as people “have a desire to tell stories”, and the app and others like it are “immediate and visceral”. Essentially, it enables users to “bring others into the moment”.

The ease-of-use of the app in getting photos uploaded quickly also permits users to “get back into your life” rather than taking too much time with the technology. In effect, taking more time to directly view and experience what a user has photographed after the photos have been easily uploaded and the phone put aside.

Both of Instagram’s founders, Michael Krieger and Kevin Systrom, have always gotten along well during the 6-year history of their company. Their respective skills in business and technology have always complemented each other.

The founders have always maintained two guiding principles in their work:

Do the simple things first.

In terms of craft and design, do fewer things better.

The biggest challenge for startups today is getting noticed as marketing and distribution have become more difficult.

2. The Wall Street Journal’s coverage, as just one representative news media source among, appeared in an article published on April 10, 2012, entitled Insta-Rich: $1 Billion for Instagram, by Shayndi Raice and Spencer E. Ante.

See the end of this post below for two updates on the Kitty Genovese Case on April 5, 2016 and May 31, 2016.

In May 1964 there was an absolutely horrific murder of a young woman in Queens, New York, named Kitty Genovese. Late at night as she was returning home from work, an attacker viciously stabbed her twice and then returned about ten minutes later to brutalize her again and murder her.

Winston Moseley was later arrested, tried and convicted for this crime. He remains in jail to this day.

At first, the crime did not receive that much attention in the press. Several weeks later, a metro writer for The New York Times reported that as many as 37 witnesses in the surrounding apartment had seen the crime and heard the victim’s cries for help but did nothing to assist or protect her. The Kitty Genovese Case as it came to be known (the link is to a concise summary on Wikipedia of the facts, history and lasting impact), turned into a decades long shameful story and commentary about the indifference of the neighbors who were alleged to have not acted when someone’s life was at stake. Over the many years since this crime, it was also often cited as a symbol for the callousness of New Yorkers.

A movie is being currently made about this terrible crime and its aftermath in an attempt to revise the misconceptions surrounding it. During a walk yesterday morning, I happened upon movie company filming this famous story on location and took a series of pictures wile they were filming. The working title of the film listed on the local notices about the filming posted on the street signs is “37”. I am not certain whether this will be for a theatrical, television or web release.

Nonetheless, below are five of the pictures I took as I walked down the street. They are sequenced in the order I took them.

The actual filming is going on in front the large white screen in the background. Notice all of the cars are from the 50’s and 60’s.

This was taken directly across the street from the filming of a scene in front of a private house.

Zooming in a bit closer, the actors and the director where working in front of the row of trees to the right.

Another view of the filming in progress taken a bit further to the right.

A better view of that beautiful old purple Plymouth.

I am looking forward to seeing this film when it is finally completed and released.

April 5, 2016 Update:

Today’s edition of The New York Times carries an article entitled Winston Moseley, Who Killed Kitty Genovese, Dies in Prison at 81, by Robert D. McFadden. This report concisely covers the original crime, trial, Winston’s 52 years in jail, and the very inaccurate reporting in 1964 and its decades-long consequences afterwards. A postscript well worth reading if you have an opportunity to this terribly tragic story.

May 31, 2016 Update:

For a very different and poignant perspective on the Kitty Genovese case, today’s (May 31, 2016) edition of The Wall Street Journal carries a feature about the lifelong work and personal sacrifices made by Ms. Genovese’s brother, Bill, in getting to the truth of what really happened to his sister and making a new documentary film about it entitled The Witness. I very highly recommend reading this article entitled Kitty Genovese’s Brother Re-Examines Her 1964 Murder in Documentary Film, by Steve Dollar.

On May 27, 2015 the author was interviewed on The Brian Lehrer Show on radio station WNYC in New York. The result is available as a truly captivating 30-minute podcast entitled When Will Robots Take Your Job? I highly recommend listening to this in its entirety. I will sum up. annotate and add some questions of my own to this.

The show’s host, Brian Lehrer, expertly guided Mr. Ford through the key complexities and subtleties of the thesis of his provocative new book. First, for now and increasingly in the future, robots and AI algorithms are taking on increasingly difficult task that are displacing human workers. Especially for those jobs that involve more repetitive and routine tasks, the more likely it will be that machines will replace human workers. This will not occur in just one sector, but rather, “across the board” in all areas of the marketplace. For example, IBM’s Watson technology can be accessed using natural language which, in the future, might result in humans no longer being able to recognize its responses as coming from a machine.

Mr. Ford believes we are moving towards an economic model where productivity is increasing but jobs and income are decreasing. He asserts that solving this dilemma will be critical. Consequently, his second key point was the challenge of detaching work from income. He is proposing the establishment of some form of system where income is guaranteed. He believes this would still support Capitalism and would “produce plenty of income that could be taxed”. No nation is yet moving in this direction, but he thinks that Europe might be more amenable to it in the future.

Brian Lehrer asked his listeners to go to a specific page on the site of the regular podcast called Planet Money on National Public Radio. (“NPR” is the network of publicly supported radio stations that includes WNYC). This page entitled Will Your Job be Done by a Machine? displays a searchable database of job titles and the corresponding chance that each will be replaced by automation. Some examples that were discussed included:

Real estate agents with a 86.4% chance

Financial services workers with a 23% chance

Software developers with a 12.8% chance

Then the following six listeners called in to speak with Mr. Ford:

Caller 1 asked about finding a better way to get income to the population beyond the job market. This was squarely on point with Mr. Ford’s first main point about decoupling income and jobs. He was not advocating for somehow trying to stop technological progress. However, he reiterated how machines are “becoming autonomous workers, no longer just tools”.

Caller 2 asked whether Mr. Ford had seen a YouTube video entitled Humans Need Not Apply. Mr. Ford had seen it and recommended it. The caller said that the most common reply to this video (which tracks very closely with many of Mr. Ford’s themes), he has heard was, wrongly in his opinion, that “People will do something else”. Mr. Ford replied that people must find other things that they can get paid to do. The caller also said that machine had made it much easier and more economical for his to compose and record his own music.

Caller 3 raised the topic of automation in the medical profession. Specifically, whether IBM’s Watson could one day soon replace doctors. Mr. Ford believes that Watson will have an increasing effect here, particularly in fields such as radiology. However, it will have a lesser impact in those specialties where doctors and patients need to interact more with each other. (See also these three recent Subway Fold posts on the applications of Watson to TED Talks, business apps and the legal profession.)

Caller 4 posited that only humans can conceive ideas and be original. He asked about how can computers identify patterns for which they have not been programmed. He cited the example of the accidental discovery of penicillin. Mr. Ford replied that machines will not replace scientists but they can replace service workers. Therefore, he is “more worried about the average person”. Brian Lehrer then asked him about driverless cars and, perhaps, even driverless Uber cabs one day. Mr. answered that although expectations were high that this will eventually happen. He is concerned that taxi drivers will lose jobs. (See this September 15, 2014 Subway Fold post on Uber and the “sharing economy”.) Which led to …

Caller 5 who is currently a taxi driver in New York. They discussed how, in particular, many types of drivers who drive for commerce are facing this possibility. Brian Lehrer followed-up by asking whether this may somehow lead to the end of Capitalism. Mr. Ford that Capitalism “can continue to work” but it must somehow “adapt to new laws and circumstances”.

Caller 6 inquired whether one of the proposals raised in VR pioneer Jaron Lanier’s book entitled Who Owns the Future (Simon & Schuster, 2013), whereby people could perhaps be paid for the information they provide online. This might be a possible means to financially assist people in the future. Mr. Ford’s response was that while it was “an interesting idea” it would be “difficult to implement”. As well, he believes that Google would resist this. He made a further distinction between his concept of guaranteed income and Lanier’s proposal insofar he believes that “Capitalism can adapt” more readily to his concept. (I also highly recommend Lanier’s book for its originality and deep insights.)

Brian Lehrer concluded by raising the prospect of self-aware machines. He noted that Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking had recently warned about this possibility. Mr. Ford responded that “we are too far from this now”. For him, today’s concern is on automation’s threat to jobs, many of which are becoming easier to reduce to a program.

To say the very least, to my own organic and non-programmatic way of thinking, this was an absolutely mind-boggling discussion. I greatly look forward to this topic will continue to gather momentum and expanded media coverage.

My own questions include:

How should people at the beginning, middle and end of their careers be advised and educated to adapt to these rapid changes so that they can not only survive, but rather, thrive within them?

What role should employers, employees, educators and the government take, in any and all fields, to keep the workforce up-to-date in the competencies they will need to continue to be valuable contributors?

Are the challenges of automation most efficiently met on the global, national and/or local levels by all interested contingencies working together? What forms should their cooperation take?

[This post was originally uploaded on October 24, 2014. It has been updated below with new information on February 3, 2015.]

Using large data sets that local government agencies in New York City have made available by virtue of the NYC Open Data program, a visiting college professor at Pratt Institute, statistician and blogger named Ben Wellington, has been taking a close quantitative look at some common aspects of everyday life here in the city. He was a guest on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC radio in New York on October 16, 2014 to discuss four of his recent posts on his I Quant NY blog presenting the results of several of his investigations and analyses. The nearly 13-minute podcast entitled We Quant NY: Stories From Data is absolutely fascinating as Wellington describes his subjects, results and supporting methodologies.

(X-ref to this Subway Fold post on April 9, 2014 post, in particular to the fourth book mentioned entitled Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend about other endeavors like this. As well, an article entitled They’re Tracking When You Turn Off the Lights by Elizabeth Dwoskin was published in The Wall Street Journal on October 20, 2014 [subscription required] about current efforts by researchers in New York and elsewhere to place “municipal sensor networks” around the city to gather and study many other data sets about the how the city operations and its residents. Townsend is also quoted in this story.)

The posts and analytics that Mr. Wellington discussed on the radio and online included:

Why it is nearly impossible to purchase or refill a MetroCard to pay your transit fares in such an amount that it will have $0.00 left on it. There always seems to be some small amount left no matter what payment option you choose at the vending machines.This irks many of my fellow New Yorkers.

Fire hydrants that generate the most tickets for parking violations.

The gender difference among the customer base for the Citi Bike sharing program. That is, Citi Bike riders in midtown Manhattan tend to be more male while riders in Brooklyn tend to be more female. Why is this so?

Which building in Manhattan is the farthest from the subway. (In his October 23, 2014 blog post, Mr. Wellington has studied and found the residence in Brooklyn which is the farthest from the subway.)

I believe that Mr. Wellington’s efforts are to be admired and appreciated because his is helping us to learn more about how NYC really operates on a very granular level. This can potentially lead to improvements in municipal services and other areas he has explored on his blog such as affordable housing, restaurant chain cleanliness (based upon the data generated by the NYC’s inspection and letter grade rating system), and the water quality and safety of the local swimming areas. I hope that he continues his efforts and inspires others to follow in this citizen’s approach to using publicly available big data for everyone’s benefit.

February 3, 2015 Update:

How interesting could the subject of laundromats in New York possibly be? As it turns out, these washing/drying/folding establishments generate some very interesting data and analytics about the neighborhoods where they operate. Who knew? Let’s, well, press on and see.

A few weeks ago, after Brian Lehrer had guests on his show to discuss President Obama’s State of the Union Address and then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s State of the State Address, he then had a segment of his show where he asked callers about the state of the own streets. This was a truly hyper-local topic about a city with a great diversity neighborhoods across its five boroughs. One of the callers to the show from the Upper West Side of Manhattan called in to say that as a result of ongoing real estate development on her street, all of her local laundromats had gone out of business.

As it turned out, Ben Wellington of the I Quant New York blog (above), heard this and went to work on an analysis to see what the city-wide data might indicate about this. He then returned as a guest on The Brian Lehrer Show on January 28, 2015, to discuss his findings. The podcast available on wnyc.org is entitled Following Up: Are Laundromats Disappearing? Mr. Wellington’s post on his I Quant NY blog, also posted on January 28th, is entitled Does Gentrification Cause a Reduction in Laundromats? I highly recommend clicking through and checking out both of them as remarkable examples of how a deeper look at some rather mundane urban data can produce such surprising results and insights about New York.

On the podcast, they were also joined by author and photographer Snorri Sturluson who wrote a book entitled Laundromat (PowerHouse Books, 2013), and later on by Brian Wallace who is the president of the Coin Laundry Association, a trade group. Mr. Sturluson’s book is a photo album sampling many of the hundreds of laundromats across the entire city. (All ten of its reviews on Amazon.com are for the full five stars.)

The ensuing discussion began with the fundamental question of whether the increased affluence and real estate development in a neighborhood directly leads to a decline in the number of local laundromats. As it turns out, a more nuanced and complicated relationship emerged from the geocoded data. In Mr. Wellington’s mapping the results indicate (as shown on both the podcast page and his blog post), that population density is more likely to be the main determinant of the concentration of laundromats. Affluence in each neighborhood is also a factor, but it should also be evaluated in conjunction with population density. The mapping also shows that certain neighborhoods in Queens such as Astoria and Jackson Heights, have the highest concentrations of Laundromats.

Callers to show raised other possible consideration such as whether there are higher numbers of recent college grads in an area, the emergence of online services that offer full laundry services including pickup and delivery, and even the social acceptability nowadays of going to a laundromat. Here are my follow-up questions:

Is population density in this analysis more particular to New York than other cities or, if similarly mapped elsewhere, would the distribution of its impact and statistically weighting appear to be similar in other comparably large cities?

What other types of businesses, government agencies, scientists and universities might be interested in these results and in testing such data in other locations?

Are there additional patterns of businesses that cluster around laundromats such as supermarkets or restaurants and, if so, how to whom might these data sets and analytics be useful?

Will the eternal mystery of where socks lost in the laundry go to ever be solved?

Adding one of the more compelling scientific studies to the ongoing and rapidly developing saga of urban car ride-sharing services, the September 2, 2014 edition of The New York Times published a summary and analysis of a study of what would happen, as the titles states, If 2 New Yorkers Shared a Cab … , by Kenneth Chang and Joshua A. Kirsch. In the findings’ simplest terms, there would be a 40% reduction on the cab fleet and corresponding improvements in traffic flows, energy consumption and the environment.

The author of this fascinating study are Steven Strogatz*, a mathematics professor at Cornell, whose team included Carlo Ratti of MIT. This article contains links to their recently published paper, an accompanying graphic of the data points overlaid upon a street map of NYC, and a link to a site they have set established enabling anyone to peruse a massive database of taxi ride info.

This article also expertly explores:

The scientific methods used to obtain these results, balanced against the reality of the fact that New Yorkers are very reluctant to voluntarily share cab rides

How the recent introductions here of Uber and Lyft are impacting the economics and dynamics of the city’s taxi industry

Whether and how the possible introduction of self-driving cars might affect the study’s findings

The concerns of a scientist who is skeptical of the study’s conclusions

The day following day, on September 3rd, Strogatz and Ratti were interviewed about their report on the Brian Lehrer Show** on WNYC in New York. They covered more of the details concerning their methods, conclusions and predictions. But what really enlivened this show were the live calls from the listeners with remarkable stories of their cab rides in NYC as passengers and from an actual driver as they related to the prospect and realities of ride sharing. I highly recommend this 23 minute podcast entitled Should We Start Sharing Taxis? for these reports from the front lines of this story.

For additional original perspectives, commentary and insights into the emergence of the new sharing economy that I found to be quite relevant to this story, I further recommend the following three articles that were published during same week:

Will this sharing trend gain further traction in other sectors of the service economy? If so, what sectors and job types might be sucsceptible? If not, is this just a trend that will quickly run its course or perhaps morph into something more enduring?

___________________________

* Professor Strogatz has written a number of highly acclaimed books on science and math. Ten years ago I had the great pleasure of reading one of them entitled Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life (Hyperion, 2004). This is a strikingly original work about how synchrony emerges from within a wide diversity of biological and environmental systems. I found his writing to be highly engaging and accessible about what otherwise would appear to be a highly complex topic for a general audience. He has done a masterful job here of explaining the concepts and examples with great clarity. I highly recommend it for any reader looking for something entirely new and different.

A far-ranging and highly informative discussion of some critical issues concerning the broadband industry in the US was presented on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC (the local NPR radio affiliate in New York City). The show’s host, Brian Lehrer, interviewed David Sirota, who is a columnist for The International Business Times. The topics they covered included:

The pending merger of Comcast and Time Warner

The service call to Comcast that went viral two weeks ago when someone tried to disconnect broadband service the company

The current developments and regulation affecting faster and cheaper web access in Tennessee and how this might affect potentially similar offerings in New York

On a multitude of many other topics, I also strongly recommend listening to The Brian Lehrer Show either on the air on WNYC in the New York metro area or online each weekday from 10 am to 12 noon EST. Each of the the show’s half dozen or so segments are quickly posted following the daily broadcasts and are available on the link to the show’s web page above. He is a truly remarkable interviewer with a deep and wide understanding of today’s issues, who has his guests and the audience members (live by phone and likewise participating via the show’s message board, Twitter and Facebook), discussing a range of local, national and global social and political issues, and topics concerning such areas as the media, work, health, the economy and so on.